Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (review)

In Modernism and Fascism, Roger Griffin, a long-standing historian and theorist of comparative fascism, brings together his assertions about the origins, meanings, and character of two phenomena that determined twentieth-century history—modernism and fascism. At the core of his wide-ranging and rich analysis stands what he calls a "new metanarrative" about the constituitive relationship between modernism and fascism. He proposes that the two states in which fascist ideology became practice, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, were exemplary "modern states" only made possible by modernism in all its forms, from aesthetic to political. For Griffin, fascism was, above all else, a reaction to the spiritual, social, cultural, and political conditions of modernity in a fundamentally modernist key. This modernist key, according to Griffin, was most pronounced in fascism's promise of palingenesis (rebirth)—the promise to transcend the condition of modernity itself.

Griffin challenges what he declares the failure of scholars of modernism and fascism to confront fully the complex interdependency of the two phenomena. He argues that we have tended to reduce modernism to its aesthetic and avant-garde cultural manifestations. By contrast, in Modernism and Fascism, he gives us a "synoptic interpretation" which "shifts or renegotiates some of the conventional demarcation lines between the disciplines dealing with fascism, modernism, and modernity" (35). He sees the "cultural turn," which led to an acknowledgement of the connections between aesthetic modernism and fascism (such as Futurist art and Rationalist architecture), as productive, but as not going far enough in pursuing the connections between fascism and modernism. For Griffin, the focus on culture kept scholars from the "truths" and "big pictures" regarding modernism's contribution to fascism. Griffin breaks new ground by synthesizing developments in art history, anthropology, and literary theory, and intellectual, social, and political history into what he deems a "reflexive metanarrative" about the manifold modern aesthetic, philosophical, and political influences which produced (not shaped or contributed to, as others might argue) fascism (37).

Griffin's highly-detailed book reveals his vast knowledge of modern and fascist art, architecture, and literature; through his many examples, Griffin explores the ways in which fascism attempted to create a new form of modernism—one which mobilized cultural and political modernism in the name of "the Nation" and "the Race." The fascist brand of modernity, argues Griffin, promised to bring closure to the search for transcendence brought on by modernity's social, spiritual, and political crisis and to resolve the primordial human quest for wholeness.

Griffin approaches his reconsideration of modernity, modernism, and fascism by, first, reconceptualizing modernism itself and, second, by synthesizing the aesthetic, philosophical, and political elements which made up the modernist character of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. He divides modernist "activity" into two branches which eventually meet in fascism—epiphanic modernism (cultural) and programmatic modernism (political).

Epiphanic modernism stressed "renewal and purification." It was a reaction to the perceived degeneration, dislocation, and anomie of modern life, destined to conclude in the rejection of modernity itself. As Griffin writes, the early twentieth century was "permeated [with] modernist metanarratives of cultural renewal which shaped a legion of activities, iniatives, and movements" (8). This category, for Griffin, includes everything from W. B. Yeats to Ernst Junger, from theosophy and spiritualism to modern dance and vegetarianism. Griffin's epiphanic modernism, in its profound quest for palingenesis, produced a culture of myths, of desires for regeneration, and Aufbruch (breaking-through).

In contrast to the yearnings of the epiphanic modernists, programmatic modernists "project[ed] a new vision, the new temporality contrived deep inside their inner world onto 'history', planning utopian ways in which society can be harmonized and synchronized with it, and leading assaults not against earthly frontiers, but citadels of decadence" (66). This political variant of modernism, with its visions of rebirth was more "prone to be entranced rather than exhausted by Modernity, and to feel spurred on to formulate projects for its transcendence within...